Abstract

We investigated the effect of exogenous abscisic acid (ABA) application on the transcriptome as well as the phenolic profiles in the skins of Vitis vinifera cv. Cabernet Sauvignon grape berries grown on the vine and cultured in vitro. ABA application rapidly induced the accumulation of anthocyanin and flavonol. Correlatively, the structural genes in the phenylpropanoid and flavonoid pathways, their transcriptional regulators, as well as genes considered to be involved in the acylation and transport of anthocyanin into the vacuole, were upregulated by ABA treatment. The Genechip analysis showed that the ABA treatment significantly up- or downregulated a total of 345 and 1,482 transcripts in the skins of berries grown on the vine and cultured in vitro, respectively. Exogenous ABA modulated the transcripts associated with osmotic responses, stress responses, cell wall modification, auxin and ethylene metabolism and responses, in addition to the induction of anthocyanin biosynthetic genes, and reduced those associated with photosynthesis; approximately half of these transcripts were identical to the previously reported ripening-specific genes.

Supplementary Table S5Expression profile of the genes that show significant change at least at one stage after ABA treatment in the skins of Cabernet Sauvignon grape berries grown on the vine (DOC 646 kb)

Supplementary Table S6Expression profile of the genes that show significant change at least at one stage after ABA treatment in the skins of Cabernet Sauvignon grape berries cultured in vitro (DOC 2020 kb)

Supplementary Fig. S2RNA degradation plots of all 20 oligonucleotide microarrays. The log-transformed preprocessed values of the probes having 16 probe pair sets on the arrays are presented in the 5′ to 3′ orientation (DOC 78 kb)

Supplementary Fig. S3Distribution of ABA-responsive transcripts according to their MIPS functional categories (MIPS 2.0) expressed in the in vitro-cultured berry skins of Cabernet Sauvignon at 10 days after the treatment. A total of 453 upregulated and 546 downregulated ABA-responsive transcripts are represented in a pie chart. The categories marked by black and white diamond were respectively over- and underrepresented in the transcript set relative to the entire chip after statistical analysis (chi-square test, p < 0.05). Significant differences between the distribution of the upregulated transcripts and that of the downregulated transcripts are indicated with a star-shaped pentagon (chi-square test, p < 0.05). The unclassified category includes categories; classification not yet clear-cut, unclassified proteins, and other categories in which a few transcripts were assigned (DOC 55 kb)

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